This meeting was held Tuesday 25 January 2005 at 16:00 UTC, in the #ubuntu-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net.
Summarized by: Benjamin Mako Hill <mako@canonical.com>
Full Log Available: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/cc-meeting_log-20050125.html
The agenda for the meeting included:
Creation of a Kubuntu mailing list (both -devel and -users)
New maintainer and member process drafts (suggested by Benjamin Mako Hill)
Reply-To on ubuntu-users (suggested by Jeff Waugh)
Before the meeting, Benjamin Mako Hill suggested that CC member should look over the thread before the meeting.
LoCo Team Leader Candidates:
Member Candidates / Maintainer Candidates for consideration
The council was missing Mark Shuttleworth this week. It was joined, yet again, by Matt Zimmerman from the Technical Board and by a large number of community members.
The council was not opposed to the idea of Kubuntu mailing lists. That said, they felt that this was a non-controversial issue for the listmaster (in this case, Jeff Waugh) who was not at the meeting. Chris Halls stated that he had asked Jeff earlier about this and Jeff had said he would do it. As a result, there was very little need for the CC to take any action.
Benjamin Mako Hill posted three documents that tried to synthesize past discussions on the new member and new maintainer processes -- from the new developers and maintainers BOF in Mataró, from the discussions in recent CC meeting and their summaries, and from the old process documents in the website.
The goal was to create a new clear policy for the way that members and maintainers are going to work. The documents are currently in three places (although the last two links may break as the documents are synthesized into a single document:
The first document gives an overview of the process and the ways to get involved (guidelines) while the second two documents each go over the details of the process and how one goes gets approved.
The council, joined by Matt Zimmerman, spent nearly an hour discussing different aspects and details of the process.
The most substantive change was suggested by James Troup and also argued in favor of by Matt Zimmerman. In the original drafts, Mako had suggested that the the community council would only be involved in approving members and that would not be required to confirm maintainers (which would be left to the technical board). James Troup argued that a CC approval for membership would not be a substitute for CC approval for maintainership (i.e., being able to upload any package into Ubuntu) and that an additional approval at this stage would be a very good thing that he felt reasonably strongly about. Benjamin Mako Hill was hesitant at first but was convinced. The text was clarified to include this change.
A large number of other smaller process issues were also hashed out and put into the drafts of the documents on the wiki.
The council approved the content/description but suggested the following minor modifications before it is put on the Ubuntu website:
Feel free to make additional suggestions either though the wiki or to Benjamin Mako Hill because, while the process received CC approval, the membership and maintainership process in Ubuntu is a flexible one and we expect it to be improved, streamlined, and adjusted over time.
About a week before the meeting, the group took a look at the most recent thread on setting a reply-to header pointing to the list for the ubuntu-users mailing list.
Several members of the council were upset by the tone of the discussion on that list which compared the lack of a reply-to header with slavery at one point. The group agreed that the tone of much of that discussion was highly in conflict with the code of conduct.
Matt Zimmerman argued that the reply-to address for that list should be turned on saying, "my opinion on the reply-to thing, FWIW, is that there seems to be a clear consensus among the user population that they want reply-to set. They don't, as a rule, use mail clients which are smart about the difference between a list-reply and a poster-reply, and they shouldn't really need to care. Technical pedantry is fine for the developer community, but it shouldn't be forced on users."
Colin Watson suggested that, "my main question is whether people will be equally pissed off with the other default."
James Troup said, "my opinion is that: if a majority of users want reply-to on ubuntu-users we should do it. But I think the people demanding it, should be the ones putting the work in to do an actual poll and prove they're not just a vocal minority." Emil echoed this sentiment. Matt Zimmerman thought this would impossible to accurately gauge and would be process overkill.
Since the lack of a reply-to-list function in at least one client that Ubuntu ships (Thunderbird), the group tossed around the idea (mentioned by Mark Shuttleworth last week over email) of getting this functionality into Thunderbird. This may be a good long-term solution.
Matt Zimmerman and others were skeptical that this alone would eliminate the problem or concern. Matt mentioned that on that list, dozens of people reply to him off-list every week which was indicative of a real problem. Benjamin Mako Hill mentioned that the issue has been brought up on the users list almost monthly and really deserved some attention and action now.
Finally, James Troup and others raised the concern that switching at this point might imply that the flame-war that brought this up was the way to get things done in Ubuntu -- which is something that the council did not want to encourage.
Jointly, Colin Watson and Benjamin Mako Hill suggested that "we make the change to turn on the reply-to header for the users list only temporarily announcing that it's a test and not due to overwhelming consensus (which is impossible to gauge) or to loud voices. We collect complaints, etc. and revisit the issue in two weeks at the next CC meeting." The council gave their approval to this solution.
As a side issue, but important to the context of this discussion, Colin Watson and others said that the group should do a better job of informing people of and enforcing the code of conduct. This will/should be mean banning people from mailing lists -- if only temporarily. You can let yourself be heard by mailing: ubuntu-users-owner@lists.ubuntu.com
In discussion new LoCo Team candidates, Benjamin Mako Hill reminded both the candidates that team leadership for LoCo teams can be decided solely by Matthias Urlichs. Those leaders need only be approved by the community council if they intend also to become Ubuntu Members (which they should do after they have demonstrated an active role in the community -- perhaps through the LoCo Team. As a result, decisions were deferred to Matthias for both Emil Oppeln Bronikowski and Andrea Abelli.
In terms of the other two member/maintainer candidates, Daniel T. Chen (crimsun) was approved by the council as an Ubuntu member. Additionally, Jeff Bailey was approved as an Ubuntu member and maintainer.